Married women stick together for good reason. Annabel Heseltine lets us into that exclusive club known as marriage.

I know now, what I had always suspected, that marriage is a club. At its worst it's a place where couples do everything in incestuous little groups of six or eight, where locations change but the faces don't. At it's best, the marriage club is a source of support for a newly-wed woman.

Marriage is a shock. It's not easy for two people to attempt to meld as a couple. Your wonderful new husband, who you had thought so well trained, is showing an alarming tendency to degenerate into a congenitally flawed male. He clips his toenails in bed, stays up too late and falls asleep on the sofa, and has to be reminded to clean his teeth or take a shower. Long walks, hand in hand, have vanished along with pink roses and surprise dinners and you don't know how to cope.

One grey day, not so many after your honeymoon plane has landed, you wake up feeling miserable, isolated and trapped. On top of all these emotions is guilt. Only a few weeks before, you had been promising undying love in front of smirking friends and teary relatives but now you wonder what it's all about.

Keeping it bottled up is not the solution. Nervously, you consider mentioning the problem to a friend. You don't want her to think that you are unhappy or teetering on the brink of divorce but who else can you talk to? A single girlfriend might draw the wrong conclusions.

But, hey, if you want to learn about marriage ask a pro - a trustworthy married friend with a few years notched onto her wedding band and no divorces to cloud her views with cynicism. The first advice I received remains with me to this day. Far from catapulting me into a divorce court my girlfriend commiserated and then encouraged me. She told me to keep a sense of humour and to be optimistic and concentrate on a positive goal that we were both working towards.

A few months after our wedding, my first experience of the marriage club occurred at a dinner party. The men had gone next door to catch the results of some dubiously important Grand Prix. They never did that when we were all single. I asked the other women at the table about their marriages. Still under the impression that married women never discussed their marriages and were smugly complacent I was stunned by the reaction.

The stories tumbled out, told with loyalty and love, but endless complaint. One woman complained she hadn't had sex for five months, another said they only did it to when they were on holiday, or her husband had lost weight and felt good about himself. Another described her husband's depression.

Interspersed with such morose stories, which made me wonder how anybody ever managed to breed, were the complaints. How could he walk past that picture which needed hanging week after week. Why does he have such awful friends, not to mention relatives who always needed entertaining or visiting. 'I hated the fact that he wanted to pick me up after work,' said the wife of a casino croupier, who preferred to have the time for herself. 'We compromised so that he only picked me up three nights a week and I got two nights off.' One couple agreed that the television could come into the bedroom on alternate months, its presence sounding the death knell on any possibility of a romantic cavort.

The advice on how to cope and where to compromise was relentless. 'My husband is a very good decision-maker but he doesn't consider the emotional factors. It is my job to make him think about them,' said one but they all had their war stories. 'I don't give way on anything,' announced another. On the subject of pregnancy and children the club rises to its metier as a fount of information on everything from miscarriage, to Braxton Hicks pains or teething problems.

Some of their advice I found archaic and ridiculous. Perhaps I am running a risk as a newly married woman but when I said 'I do', I did not anticipate becoming a man's notion of Pamela Anderson dressed in a pinny. Each couple needs to work out their own marriage rules and there are no short cuts but the support from other married women is invaluable in the early days of married life.

Are you part of the club? Get into the nitty gritty of your relationship with other iVillage members.